Thursday, July 26, 2007

Samantha Update; Making WebEx Mindnumbingly Simple

Finally, my Samantha update....

For those of us who live and breathe collaboration every day, using on-demand collaboration tools is completely 2nd nature. Personally, I've been in this space for almost 5 years, first at PlaceWare and now WebEx and frankly, I could not imagine my life without real-time communication tools. I feel I would be back in the ice ages. Without my cellphone, blackberry, IM and WebEx, my life would be quite more complex. I can work where ever I have an Internet connection and phone reception. My team knows my presence info and how to contact me and frankly does not care where I am. I am available to answer questions, escalate issues and jump into a meeting, regardless if I am at work, working from home or on the road. And since I know where the off bottom is on my cellphone and my blackberry, my wife has only threatened to "do something big" to me a couple times. :-)

That's for those of us for whom web 2.0; office 2.0; mash-ups and collaborative applications actually means something. For everybody else, it may be fair to assume that they may be just a little bit uncomfortable with a web meeting. But as most of us know, once teach somebody to take their first steps, they will be running in no time.

So that's where Samantha comes in; a virtual meeting assistant who helps the user with their first web conferencing steps. I've developed several versions of Samantha and in the first 6 months of the program, we've seen some very impressive results. So feel free to let Samantha take you by the hand. We've even localized her for the Latin American and Spanish market; Bienvenidos Claudia!

and

If you believe Samantha has helped you become a better WebEx presenter, leave a comment to this blog

--jan

Saturday, February 03, 2007

Samantha - Your Personal WebEx Assistant

In December, I had this "crazy" idea to add a virtual assistant to the WebEx Free Trial. The idea was to help users of the free trial better understand the value of WebEx by giving them their personal virtual assistant who would do a quick walk through of WebEx Meeting Center, and get the user comfortable enough to start playing with the service, invite others to his meeting and leave with a strong call to action to get the users to make their next meeting a WebEx meeting. So far the results have been a little overwhelming. There is almost unanimous agreement that Samantha is a great idea and will help dramatically in improving the overall usability and comfort level of/with WebEx. We're actively working on adding Samantha into different areas of WebEx. I would stay...TO BE CONTINUED...

If you want to see Samantha in action; you can sign up for a WebEx free trial here.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

New Media Stuff

So, the question is, how do I best post a recording of my WebEx meeting to my blog?

Well I can do this: Listen to the recording of my WebEx meeting.

Maybe I can embed the hyperlink into an image










Drop me a comment with your thoughts

Google stuff is still not working perfectly...

So Blogger.com is supposedly out of beta...but for me to post my Google document to my blog, I need to set my settings to Blogger.com (Beta). When it was set to Blogger.com, all i got was the error message below.

Having said that, I am pretty impressed with the ability to publish the document directly from Google docs to the blog. That is cool.
Jan 25, 2007 (4:35 PM)

This is my Google Docs test document. I'm very curious how this works in combination with my blog. When I first tested this in October of 2006, I just could not get this to work. Let's see if this works now.

In great anticipation...

And...after several tries, I still don't seem to be able to do this...all I get is this error message


WebEx Connect Launch Video

In September, I made my WebEx acting debut at the WebEx Connect Launch Party. Click here to see the video on YouTube.